New Embotics Executive Team Readies Channel Onslaught

Among the changes made was the appointment of John Ross, the former chief technology officer at GreenPages Technology Solutions, a Kittery, Maine-based solution provider and No. 153 on CRN's Solution Provider 500 list, as Embotics first-ever CTO.

Embotics also named Michael L. Torto, former CEO of cloud software startup rPath, as its new CEO. Torto takes the reins from Embotics' founder and president, Jay Litkey, who will remain president.

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According to Ross, a 20-year IT veteran who has helped bring a number of disruptive technologies to market including VMware and Citrix virtualization products, Embotics is looking to him to help stage a major channel offensive around its vCommander virtualization and cloud management platform.

"We are, first of all, going to move to a 100 percent channel model with me coming on board," Ross, who spent seven years at distributor Alternative Technologies helping solution providers build services offerings around cutting-edge products, told CRN.

Embotics, headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, launched a global channel program in 2008, and has partners today in the U.K., Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and a small group in the U.S. The company, however, is looking to grow its channel footprint moving forward, and it will soon reveal the addition of some "major regional partners" here in the U.S., Ross said.

Ross also said Embotics is set to launch the latest version of its vCommander platform -- version 5.0 -- at the VMworld conference in San Francisco next week. The new release, according to Ross, will add both integrated application performance management capabilities, along with economic assessment tools that help partners evaluate the cost of customers moving workloads to different cloud or virtualized environments, whether it be Amazon, for instance, or Microsoft Hyper-V.

Ross said these assessment capabilities will not only allow partners to evaluate the current costs of a customer's virtualized environment, but the historical and potential future costs, as well.

"When partners come into an environment, they need to be able to rapidly assess not only what's going on now, but historically," Ross said. "And they need to be able to show value in a very short period of time, and they need to prove to the customer that they know their environment as well or better than their own on-premise staff."

Other features of vCommander include self-service provisioning, private cloud automation, and virtual machine inventory alignment and lifecycle management. But the real value of the platform, Ross said, is cost-savings.

"We give the customer the ability to right-size their environment," Ross said. "The importance of that is recovering waste on storage, recovering waste on memory, recovering waste on CPU or things of that nature."

Ross said Embotics has 80 vCommander customers today, with 35 of them being on-boarded in the past year. He also said the new release of vCommander lays the groundwork for a cloud brokerage platform Embotics hopes to roll out to the channel.

"We're not going to go and run deals anymore direct. We are going to be 100 percent channel," Ross said.

PUBLISHED AUG. 9, 2013